How to Play TUNL
One button, a narrowing cave, and nine kinds of coin, two of which are lying to you. Here is everything the game does not stop to explain.
Updated 2 October 2026 for TUNL 18.4.
The one control
Tap to hop. Hold to climb. Let go to fall. That is the entire control scheme. Tap or hold anywhere on the screen, or use Space or the up arrow on a keyboard.
Every press is a short hop: even the quickest tap gives the ship a fixed burst of thrust, so a tap always does something. Hold past it and the thrust keeps going. Thrust is an acceleration, not a jump to a new height. You are not setting your position, you are setting which direction your speed is changing, and your ship carries its momentum through the switch. Letting go at the top of a climb means you keep rising for a moment before gravity wins. New players almost always react too late and then overcorrect, which is the classic oscillation everyone does on their first few runs.
The fix is to think one bend ahead rather than reacting to the bend you are in. A steady rhythm of taps holds an altitude. Longer holds change it.
The opening: city, glide and runway
Every run starts the same way, on purpose. You are flying over the day's city at dusk, the skyline sliding past behind you, with a mountain ahead and a rock mouth in it. The banner says ENTERING THE TUNL, the ship climbs into frame and levels out, and you fly in. The city is a backdrop and a breather. The cave (and your score) begins at the mouth, and it is the same cave for everyone that day, whatever the city looks like.
Three deliberate mercies follow.
First, gravity does not switch on until you press. The ship flies dead level until your first tap, or for a couple of seconds, whichever comes first. You never drop before you have acted, including on a restart.
New pilots get more help than that. Until your best run passes a couple of hundred points, the run waits over the city for your first tap, however long you take, and a white circle near the bottom of the screen shows each tap through the opening stretch. Only your own taps move the ship. The very first time, a short practice flight over the city comes before the tunnel: a row of light beads marks the line, and the tunnel opens once you have followed it, or after a few seconds either way. Pass it once and it does not come back.
Second, the first stretch of cave is an open hall. For roughly the first 50 points the corridor is pushed out to the edges of the screen and there are no stalactites, mines, boulders or cannons at all. Only coins, and occasionally a warp ring. It is where you are supposed to get the feel of thrust against gravity, so use it.
Third, the walls are real, but you get two hull scratches. Touching a wall costs one scratch instead of your run: the ship is pushed back inside, the game says SCRAPE! and a diamond disappears from the pair at the bottom right of the screen. There is a short grace period in which the wall cannot scratch you again. With both scratches gone, the next wall contact ends the run. The scratches last the whole run, and they forgive walls only: a stalactite, a mine, a boulder or a cannon shot is a direct hit and is handled by shields, not scratches.
Scratches can be repaired. Every mine or cannon shot you destroy with ammo drops a wrench where it blew up. Fly through it and both diamonds are back, however many you had lost. It pays a few points as well, so it is worth taking even with a full hull. It stays where it fell: the magnet does not pull it in, and if you fly past it, it is gone.
How scoring works
Your score is distance plus bonuses:
- Distance is the floor of how far the cave has scrolled. It is the bulk of any score and it is the only part you cannot shortcut.
- Coin combo: coins picked up within two seconds of each other build a streak, and each coin is worth three points times the current streak level. A chain of five is worth far more than five separate coins.
- Near miss: passing within about two ship-widths of a wall pays a point, with a short cooldown so you cannot farm it by hugging.
- Shooting: once you carry ammo, every stalactite, mine or cannon shot you destroy in flight pays a few points on the spot.
Two things follow from this. Coin routing genuinely matters, because a tight chain outscores a lazy sweep of the same coins. And flying close to walls is rewarded, which is the game quietly encouraging the exact behaviour that kills you.
How a run is paced: sectors
A run is not one long ramp. It is a sequence of sectors, each about seven seconds of flying at the game's reference speed, and each one either adds something new or turns up something you already know. When you cross into a new sector from the third onward a SECTOR notice tells you so. Roughly, and by score:
| Sector | Score | What arrives |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 - 50 | The open hall. Gold and hourglass coins, no hazards. |
| 1 | 50 - 110 | The first stalactites, and the shield coin to answer them. |
| 2 | 110 - 180 | Ammo and the magnet. |
| 3 | 180 - 250 | The first mine, alone and centred, and the bomb coin. |
| 4 | 250 - 330 | Boulders. |
| 5 | 330 - 410 | Chicanes: spikes from both walls at once. |
| 6 | 410 - 490 | Wall cannons. |
| 7 | 490 - 580 | Falling stalactites. |
| 8 | 580 - 680 | The poison coin. |
| 9 | 680 - 770 | The drain coin. |
| 10+ | 770 and up | Nothing new. The rates keep climbing. |
Two rules sit behind that table. The first is that tools come before the threat they answer: you can pick up a shield a full sector before the first mine that wants one. The second is that each sector is a sawtooth. Its first fifth is a breather, with fewer hazards and more coins, and then it ramps up again toward the next boundary. The pattern is: a little rest, then a little more pressure, then a new idea.
Past the last new idea, the hazards do not stop getting denser and the cave does not stop getting faster. That is by design. Speed never plateaus, and one of the hazards, the mine, is placed anywhere across the corridor rather than against a wall, so a very long run is never just an endurance test at a fixed pace. Every run ends eventually.
The nine coins
Every coin is drawn as the thing it does, so you can read it before you have learned it. Coins arrive in a fixed order as you go deeper, so early runs are simple and later ones are busy. Gold comes first, then the hourglass, then shields, then bullets and the magnet; the two hazard coins and the laser come last.
| Coin | What it does | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Gold | Widens the corridor. The bonus decays over a few seconds. | A gold gem with two arrows pushing outward. The core resource: top it up constantly rather than banking it. |
| Hourglass | Slows the scroll, then ramps back to full speed over several seconds. | A blue hourglass. Best grabbed just before a dense stretch, not inside one. |
| Shield | A shield. Absorbs exactly one hit. | A violet shield. Save it for mines. Walls you can dodge; mines you often cannot. |
| Ammo | Bullet ammo. Your ship fires forward. | An orange crosshair. Destroys stalactites, mines, and cannon fire in flight. |
| Magnet | A magnet that pulls nearby coins toward you. | A green horseshoe magnet. It will not pull the two hazard coins. They stay where they are. |
| Bomb | Detonates on pickup and clears every hazard in a radius. | A red bomb with a burning fuse. Pure upside, always take it. |
| Poison | Hazard. Breaks your combo and takes a share of the shards you have earned this run. | A green poison flask with a dark X. |
| Drain | Hazard. Breaks your combo and takes a share of your current score. | A pink whirlpool turning inward. It bites harder the deeper you are. |
| Laser | For a few seconds a beam runs from your nose to the next wall and burns through crystals, mines and cannon shots. A boulder in its path catches fire and bursts. | A cut ruby firing a beam. Deeper in the cave it turns up in place of an ammo coin. Aim the beam at what is coming, not at what is already beside you. |
Learn the two hazard coins by shape, not colour. Every coin is drawn as what it does, and the two that hurt you look like it: poison is a flask of poison with an X on it, drain is a whirlpool that sucks inward. At speed you will register the object long before you register the colour, which is exactly why they were drawn that way.
Why gold is the whole game
The corridor narrows as you go deeper, and past a certain point it stops narrowing and simply stays tight while the scroll speed keeps climbing forever. Gold is the only thing that pushes back. With the bonus topped up, the corridor is dramatically wider than the baseline, which at depth is the difference between a navigable tunnel and a wall.
Because the bonus decays, it behaves like a fuel gauge rather than a score. A player who collects ten gold coins in one greedy burst and then none for fifteen seconds is in far more trouble than one who takes a coin every few seconds forever.
The hazards
These also arrive in order, one per sector as the table above shows, so you meet them one at a time.
- Stalactites are crystal spikes rooted in the ceiling or floor. The hitbox is the big central crystal, so the shape you see is the shape that hits you.
- Chicanes are paired spikes from both walls at once, forcing a weave.
- Mines float free anywhere across the corridor rather than being anchored to a wall. They are the one hazard you cannot outgrow, and they are the reason no run can last forever.
- Boulders are large rocks that never span the corridor. There is always a way above and a way below, one comfortable and one a squeeze. They ask you to commit early rather than react late.
- Cannons are wall turrets that fire a single diagonal shot as you approach, then go quiet. The shot looks like your own bullet, just angled.
- Falling stalactites shake and trickle dust before they break loose, then drop the full height of the corridor. The shake is your warning. The answer is almost always to go over the top.
The warp portal
A hoop occasionally hangs in the corridor. Fly through it.
For a couple of seconds you accelerate to well over double speed, the corridor widens, every hazard passes through you harmlessly, and gold coins are vacuumed in automatically and fed straight into your combo. It is not a trap and there is no drawback. It is the single most valuable thing on screen and it is worth a real detour to line up.
The star
A thin meter at the bottom left of the console fills as you collect. Every good coin adds to it and a clean pass through a warp ring adds more; a good coin you let scroll past, or a hazard coin you touch, takes some away.
When the meter is full it charges for a moment, then your ship becomes a star for a few seconds, the frenzy. Crystals, mines, cannon shots and boulders you fly into shatter and pay points, poison and drain break harmlessly, the walls hold you instead of hurting you, and your shield is not spent. The speed does not change: the warp races past everything, the star clears it.
Each star in the same run costs more to fill than the one before. It is a reward for long runs, so do not expect one in the first minute.
Strategy that actually works
Fly the middle, not the gap you can see
The corridor's centre is a moving target. Chasing the current gap keeps you permanently half a beat behind. Aiming at where the centre is going costs nothing and gives you room in both directions when something unexpected appears.
Spend the shield on the unpredictable thing
A shield burned on a wall you could have dodged is wasted. Mines and cannon fire are what you cannot always plan around, so carrying a shield into a dense stretch is worth more than cashing it early.
Treat the two hazard coins as obstacles
They sit in the coin lane and they look approximately like a reward. The habit worth building is a half-beat of checking shape before committing to any pickup, especially once the magnet is active, since the magnet pulling real coins toward you can carry you into a hazard coin it deliberately refuses to pull.
Chain, but do not chase
Combo points are real but distance is bigger. A chain you extend along your existing line is free. A chain you cross the corridor for at speed, into a narrowing section, usually is not.
When the run ends
The world freezes for a moment when you die, the wrecked ship stays on screen, and a reticle contracts onto whatever hit you. That pause is the game answering "what did I just do wrong" before it shows you a single number. Then comes the debriefing:
- Your score, with a rail under it that runs toward your all-time best or, if this run was nowhere near it, toward the next milestone. That is the bar a short run is actually playing against.
- Your rank on today's world leaderboard and how many places you moved since your last run, once enough people have flown the day's cave for the number to mean something.
- A strip of scenes from the run: one real frame from each sector you reached, then the frozen moment of the crash, then a dashed slot naming the sector you were trying for.
- Anything the run earned: shards, a ship unlock, a mastery level, a finished daily mission.
- A share card after a strong run: a picture of the tunnel you flew, with the spot you died and your best marked on it, not just a number.
In the iOS and Android apps, a run that got somewhere, and every few runs any run at all, can be continued once by watching a short optional video. The continue puts you back in the cave, clears the danger around you, gives you a moment of invulnerability and repairs both hull scratches. The browser version has no rewarded video, so it never offers a free second life; that one is an app feature.
Ships, shards and stardust
Coins you collect are banked as shards at the end of a run, which unlock ships. Ships are not skins: each one trades something away for something else, so picking one is a build choice rather than a cosmetic one.
The later ships also need stardust, which is earned simply by opening the game on a given day, with a bonus for unbroken weekly streaks. Stardust is never spent, only checked as a threshold. It means the deepest unlocks are gated on showing up over time rather than on grinding a single long session.
There is a full page on the eight ships, their trade-offs, mastery and paint finishes.
The daily cave
Every player flies the same cave on the same day, generated from the date. It resets at UTC midnight. That is what makes the daily leaderboard meaningful, and it is also why the ghost of your best run can race alongside you: the cave is reproducible, so a replay only has to remember your altitude.
The ghost is scoped to the day. Each morning opens with no ghost, and your first good run creates the thing you spend the rest of the day chasing.
If you want the technical version of how that works, including two bugs that quietly broke it, there is a devlog post on the daily cave generator.